www.newsandletters.org

NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005

'Murders Most Foul'

Murders Most Foul: Poems Against War by a World Trade Center Survivor, by Sam Friedman, $7.00. Order from NEWS & LETTERS (add $1 postage).

Sam Friedman’s booklet of poetry, MURDERS MOST FOUL, was written for the Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War for use in the anti-war movement. Sam is a September 11 survivor and a long-time socialist activist whose movement work embraces struggles from civil rights to the multi-radical.

His passion for "unsettling" people is reflected in poetry that becomes meaningful in the space between it and the world. It takes a brave plunge to weave emotions, ideas, and insights--anger, anguish, hope--into a poetic creation for change and transformation (one of Sam’s important themes).

His poems probe the present:

How many hours
to teach this parents’ child
to crawl an inch too far
and meet a cluster bomb’s curse? 

Ask not those upstream
about
torture,
about
prisons,
but forgive them not
for they choose not to
know.

And his poems see beyond the present: 

when once we can see
to rip out this system
and set ourselves free.

We share deeply with Sam this vision in his poem "Privilege," and that in "If Humanity Wins," which goes on to imagine us,

as we build our embraceable
new global city
from the petals and rootings of dreams.

--Sheila Garden

Return to top

Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search

Subscribe to News & Letters

Published by News and Letters Committees
Designed and maintained by  Internet Horizons